“It was a small community and a very vibrant place,” D Indumathi (Indu) says about her time as a PhD student at The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai in the late eighties and the early nineties. “The whole institute used to get together for dinner parties on the old building terrace. All of us students used to meet up, chatting until late, discussing all kinds of things,” says Indu, who recently retired as a faculty in theoretical physics from IMSc.
Discussions like these sowed the seeds for Jantar Mantar, a children’s science magazine published by the Tamil Nadu Science Forum for the last thirty-two years.
“It was a very aspirational time in the nineties. The markets were opening up and people wanted to learn English. They wanted access to material which was not very difficult for children to read,” says Indu. As part of the Tamil Nadu Science Forum, students and faculty at IMSc, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) had also been interacting with people’s science networks across different states. They wanted to write articles in English that could potentially be translated into other languages. At this time, the Forum was already bringing out Thulir, a very popular Tamil children’s science magazine. However, many students and faculty at IMSc and IIT Madras couldn’t communicate in Tamil, but were enthusiastic about contributing articles in English.
When ideas around Jantar Mantar were taking shape, Thulir, a children's science magazine in Tamil by TNSF had already been around for a few years gaining popularity (Image: Thulir webpage).
Many of them recognised how popular science writing had shaped their own early interest in science. “When I was a kid in the seventies, I got inspired to become a scientist by popular science books like One, Two, Three…Infinity by George Gamow and Brighter Than a Thousand Suns by Robert Jungk, and a magazine called Science Today,” says R Shankar, retired professor in theoretical physics from IMSc, about his early influences. “I grew up with Kumar, a Gujarati magazine, which also extended to the arts. I remember reading my first Feluda stories by Satyajit Ray there,” says Kamal Lodaya, retired IMSc professor in theoretical computer science, who has been writing for Jantar Mantar since its very first edition. “It shaped my desire to learn more and become a scientist,” he adds.
“We had a long meeting one evening,” says Basheer Ahmed, who has been associated with the design and layout of Jantar Mantar right from the beginning. “We had a discussion about the name of the magazine, periodicity, number of pages, content, etc. We finalised the name Jantar Mantar,” he adds. “The magazine has a byline ‘Children’s Science Observatory’, because we wanted to have articles that encouraged children to do experiments,” Indu explains. “The early editions had a lot of articles about how things work and how to do experiments.” The magazine’s logo was designed by Ranjan De from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. In the mid- and late 1990s, the IIT Madras group of Sunil Kumar, Archana Ghode, Abhijit Deshpande and Susy Varughese were actively involved in all aspects of the magazine, from contributing articles to editing and publishing the magazine.
Writing for children is no child’s play. “It is important to keep the sentences short and use simple English. Scientists are really bad at writing simply because we want to be accurate and are not used to writing for children,” she explains. To Indu, the nature of the message and the tone in which it is being conveyed are also important. “Nuances are very hard to communicate when it is not a one-on-one conversation where things can be discussed in detail,” she says about the challenges of the written medium. “I like to tell children about issues like climate change and pollution, but not in a doomsday-like scenario,” she stresses. “I think you should give them some hope, always.”
In the early years, students and faculty running Jantar Mantar would meet regularly at one of their houses. “We would decide what would be in the next issue, what articles we already have, and if we need to fill in any gaps,” recalls Indu. Some columns like Nature’s Diary, Science News, a science quiz called Do You Know? and a maze, Find the way!, recur in each issue. Most other articles vary from issue to issue and are written by a pool of contributors.
Vikram, an elephant from Mudumalai, and his friend Lakshmi discuss physics in a series of articles written by former IMSc faculty R Shankar. In this illustration by former student Madhushree Basu, Lakshmi explains a parabola to Vikram. (Image from JM60)
“My contributions have not been related to my research,” says Shankar, something that is common across researchers writing for Jantar Mantar. Shankar really enjoyed writing a series of articles about an elephant (Vikram) and a young girl (Lakshmi) exploring science, and also created crossword puzzles for the magazine. Fictional characters like Vikram and Lakshmi not only generate curiosity but can also be a means of showcasing diversity. S Krishnaswamy, retired professor from Madurai Kamaraj University and visiting faculty at IMSc, writes articles with the characters Zareena, Mookayi and Mari, girls from different backgrounds in Madurai. “These articles have been fun to write as the setting and the conversations between them need to be imagined,” he says.
Many authors find joy in learning things outside of their discipline. “I have written on almost all topics in the sciences and humanities. I particularly like writing articles where I myself get to learn something. My favourite articles are about how a subject changes,” says Kamal. He has often written about subjects that he disliked in school, such as history and organic chemistry. Gautam Menon, former IMSc faculty now at Ashoka University, Sonipat, has written about the origin of life, climate change and soft matter physics. One of his favourite articles, Eggsperiments with the Archimedes Principle, is about buoyancy. “I wrote it after a visit to Israel and the Dead Sea, to check if eggs would float in water of such high salinity,” Gautam says. On one of Indu’s travels, she came across a book on memory that completely fascinated her. “I worked on an article on memory for a very long time and it was difficult to write. I have written three more articles on the subject,” she says.
Other articles in Jantar Mantar are very topical. Since its first appearance, an article on elections by R Ramanujam, retired IMSc faculty in theoretical computer science, has been republished in the magazine before every major election. He uses simple examples to explain the different systems of elections around the world, illustrating their advantages and drawbacks. In November each year, the magazine also publishes a series of articles covering the Nobel Prize following the announcements in October, many of them written by MVN Murthy, also a former professor at IMSc. He has also written two-part articles on topics such as geographic coordinate systems and the periodic table.
In the early years of the magazine, once all the articles were written, it would take a couple of weeks for Basheer to finish the design and layout before printing copies. Today, it takes less than a week. “When I came into the field, magazine articles were given as handwritten manuscripts,” he says. “Hand composing, monotype and linotype composing were vanishing slowly and phototypesetting was in its initial stages. The text was typed using a computer and printed on photographic paper, which was used to create the layout manually,” he explains. “Then came laser typesetting and laser printers, which were much cheaper. Only those who were able to adapt to those tools were able to survive.”
“In the beginning, Madhavan [Madhavan Mukund, now faculty at CMI] and Kamal took care of the layout, and Deepak [Deepak Khemani from IIT Madras] did most of the illustrations,” says Basheer. Indu remembers them physically placing photographs within the text to create the layout. “We would go around searching for photographs that could go alongside the articles,” she recalls. “We did not have access to the kind of material available today. It was a very different world.” In the nineties, RK Laxman allowed them to publish some of his cartoons for a small fee and they appeared as a series. Other members at IMSc contributed illustrations. “I had been doodling, but this was the first time that I did illustrations for a science article,” says Madhushree Basu, former IMSc student who started her journey as a science illustrator with Shankar’s Vikram-Lakshmi series.
Release of the special edition of Jantar Mantar celebrating 60 years of IMSc (January 2023). Photo: IMSc Media
For a magazine running on voluntary article contributions for over three decades, Jantar Mantar has seen its share of challenges. “It is a lot of work to bring out the magazine, and can be difficult since this is not the primary job of most people contributing to it,” says Indu. “The magazine would be in flux when people left to other places, and couldn't contribute when they got busy or pulled out of the magazine,” she explains. Another challenge is related to its distribution. Indu explains that people in cities with access to the internet may not want to buy Jantar Mantar, and fewer English medium schools in rural areas limit the magazine’s reach. Distributing the magazine through newsagents for a wider reach would shoot up its price and make it unaffordable to many. “We have always been beholden to IMSc, for the IMSc 60 and JM 25 issues,” says Indu, about IMSc’s support in bringing out special issues celebrating 60 years of IMSc and 25 years of Jantar Mantar.
“I would be happy if it had more of a pan-India presence. I think there is a need for it. A lot of children aspire to read in English, and this is useful information,” says Indu. “There are very few science magazines aimed at those who are school-aged that use examples from India and the sorts of colloquialisms and informal language that are common to us. What exists often lacks local context and significance,” says Gautam. “Magazines which convey information about the world in a light but reasoned way, yet manage to challenge the reader, are very important to students,” says Kamal. “They teach them how to tackle learning.”
